Usually the heavy steel cutting edge (blade) is expendable and is removably attached, e.g., with bolts, to the bottom of the plow moldboard. It scrapes along the pavement and can wear out in 8 to 10 hours. The wear often is uneven, and blades (cutting edges) sometimes break during plowing. Plows also often encounter substantial curb wear which can require major rebuilding. All this maintenance is costly.
The present invention is directed to increasing snow plow blade life substantially, reducing blade breakage, protecting blade ends from curb wear, protecting the moldboards of snow plows, and generally cutting downtime for plow maintenance.
Its advantages over prior virtually all-metal snow plow guard proposals include an ability to be made somewhat lower in weight without an inordinate sacrifice in efficacy, an ability to be made to yield slightly to certain expected impacts rather than meeting them rigidly with potentially greater wear and tear, an ability to be made to bend and return more readily to near original shape from other impacts, and an ability to unite extreme toughness and resilience with hardness in the guard structure.